A small business website built on a DIY platform can be live in days. A freelancer will typically take one to three weeks for a small site. An agency will usually run one to three months. Those are the real ranges, and which one applies to you depends on which route you choose — and how prepared you are before work starts.
The route matters less than people think. The actual variable that decides whether your project takes two weeks or two months is almost always content: whether your text, photos, and decisions are ready when the developer needs them. More on that below, but it's worth knowing upfront because it's the thing most clients don't expect.
Timeline by Route
DIY Website Builder
A builder — Squarespace, Wix, WordPress.com — can be live in a day or two if you sit down and focus on it. A realistic timeline for someone fitting it around a job is a weekend for the basics, another few evenings to refine it, and you're live within a week.
The main variables: how much content you have ready, how quickly you make design decisions, and whether you can resist the temptation to keep tweaking. Builders make it easy to endlessly adjust things. Set a deadline for yourself.
Freelance Developer
A freelancer building a small business site of four to six pages typically runs one to three weeks from first conversation to live site. That assumes a clear brief, one round of revisions, and content ready early.
Why that window? The first two or three days go on scoping and setup. You'll usually have a first version to look at by the end of the first week. Feedback, revisions, and final testing fill week two. If content is held up, or feedback comes in slowly, or there's a disagreement about something that needs resolving, you drift into week three.
For a straightforward fixed-scope project with everything prepared, the faster end of that range is real. A small fixed-scope site can genuinely go live within the 1–3 week window — sometimes in the first week, when content is ready on day one and there's a single decision-maker approving changes quickly.
Agency
An agency project runs one to three months, and often closer to the longer end for anything with a custom design.
Month one is usually discovery, strategy, and design — workshops, moodboards, design concepts, approval rounds. Month two is build and content. Month three is testing, revisions, and launch prep.
The process is thorough for a reason. Agencies do more research, more design iteration, more quality assurance. But part of the timeline is also process overhead — handoffs between departments, the queue of other client projects running in parallel, the number of meetings built into their standard engagement. For a complex site where you need the full managed experience, that's appropriate. For a five-page brochure site, it's often more process than the project needs.
The Step That Causes Almost Every Delay
The developer is usually waiting on you.
I say this having run projects on both sides of the table: the most common reason a website project runs late is that content — copy, images, decisions — isn't ready when the developer needs it.
This isn't a criticism. Writing the text for a website is harder and more time-consuming than most business owners expect. Describing what you do in a way that's clear, compelling, and the right length for a web page is real work. Finding or taking good photos takes time. Deciding whether you want a booking form or a contact form or just a phone number requires a decision.
All of this is easy to underestimate. You hire a developer, you think "they're going to build the site, my job is just to answer their questions," and then you realise the first question is "can you send me the text for your homepage?" and you haven't written it yet.
When content isn't ready on the day it's needed, the project stops. The developer can't fill the pages, can't check that the layout works, can't do SEO basics without knowing what the page is about. A one-week delay in providing your About page copy is a one-week delay in your project.
What a Realistic Two-Week Freelancer Schedule Looks Like
This is roughly how a well-run two-week small business website project actually goes:
Day 1–2: Kick-off call, finalise scope, developer sets up hosting and structure. You provide all content — everything, even rough drafts.
Day 3–5: Developer builds the first version based on your content and brief. You're available to answer questions same-day.
Day 6: You get a link to review the first version.
Day 7–8: You compile feedback — one round, from one person. Not a committee. Not "I'll ask my partner too." One decision-maker.
Day 9–10: Developer makes revisions. Any minor tweaks go in here.
Day 11–12: Final review, testing on mobile, checking forms work, going through the SEO basics.
Day 13–14: Launch.
That schedule works when content is ready on day one. Every day you're late sending copy or images pushes the whole timeline right.
How to Keep Your Project on Schedule
Prepare content before you hire anyone. This is the single most effective thing you can do. Write rough drafts of every page — homepage, services, about, contact. Take photos, or buy stock. Have your logo ready. Even rough drafts are infinitely more useful than nothing: a developer can work with "this is too long but here's the general idea" in a way they cannot work with "I'll get you that text soon."
Name one decision-maker. If three people need to approve the design, you will have three sets of conflicting feedback, and the project will stall while everyone reaches consensus. One person approves, everyone else feeds into that person. This is the most underrated thing on this list.
Batch your feedback. When you get a draft to review, go through the whole thing and send everything at once. Don't send one thing, get it fixed, notice something else, send that. Every feedback loop has a delay, and small drips of notes add up fast.
Respond quickly. If your developer asks a question, try to answer the same day. A 48-hour response to a quick question is a 48-hour pause on the project.
How I Run Projects
My projects use fixed scope — before any work starts, we agree in writing exactly what pages are being built, what each one contains, and what "done" means. That document prevents the scope drift that turns a simple project into a long one.
During the build, I do weekly progress updates so you always know where things stand. If something is going to move a deadline, you hear about it from me before it becomes a problem, not after.
You can see how I typically structure an engagement at Buno Labs — How I Work.
If you're at the stage of choosing between routes — builder versus developer versus agency — Wix or Squarespace vs Hiring a Developer covers the tradeoffs in more detail. If you're ready to brief a developer and want to know what questions to ask, Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Web Developer will help you get useful answers from whoever you talk to.
